Speaker Bios

Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History from Kent State University in 2003,andan MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond in 2005.She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She has been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Grant. She is also a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. Al-Hadid has had solo exhibitions at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, RI, NYU Abu Dhabi University Gallery, Abu Dhabi, UAE, The Vienna Secession in Vienna, Austria, the Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH, the Akron Museum of Art, Akron, OH, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NCthe Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA,the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX,the Centro de Arte Contemporánea, La Conservera, Murcia, Spain,the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV,and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.Her work is included in collections such as the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, theWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY,the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA,the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,TX, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro,NC. She has had large public installations at Madison Square Park, New York, NY, and at Williams College, Williamstown, MA. She is represented in New York by Marianne Boesky Gallery.

Devin Allen is a documentary photographer, born and raised in West Baltimore, who takes his city as his subject. He rose to national attention when one of his photographs of the Baltimore Up- rising was published on the cover of Time in May 2015. While Allen’s photography historicizes Baltimore, his educational programs are dedicated to empowering young people with cameras so they can tell their stories.

Andy Bichlbaum began his current adulthood by inserting a swarm of kissing men to a shoot-'em-up video game just before it shipped to store shelves. Finding himself fired and momentarily famous, he opted to go into weird activism. Since then, as co-founder of the Yes Men (www.theyesmen.org), he's worked for entities such as Exxon, Dow, Monsanto, and the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as for the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Washington Post, all without their approval.

Elizabeth King combines figurative sculpture with stop-frame animation in works that blur the boundary between actual and virtual object. Influenced by the history of the puppet, the automaton, and literature’s legends in which the artificial figure comes to life, her work touches on the mind/body riddle, the anatomy of emotion, the human/machine interface, and the direct gaze in an increasingly mediated world. Her most recent solo show Radical Small was on view at MASS MoCA from February 2017 through January 2018. She is represented by Danese/Corey in New York. She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Sculpture and Extended Media from 1985 to 2015.

Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, social justice and migration, through sculpture, painting and socially engaged public art projects. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; El Museo Nacional de Bella Artes de la Habana, Cuba; La Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris; El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; The San Juan Poly-Graphic Triennial, Puerto Rico, and The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, and he was a fellow of the smARTpower Program – an international, community-based art initiative of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Newark Museum, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

Luciano is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University School of Art. He is currently an A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art and an Artist in Residence within the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Civic Practice Partnership Artist Residency program.

Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.

Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification.

A retrospective of her work has been shown internationally, and her writing is published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst.

In 2012, she presented a new series of photographs, taken during her trip to Cuba in January 1981, and in November, she presented the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA in New York. In 2013, her book of essays, Culture Class, which deals with the role of artists in cities and gentrification, was published by e-flux and Sternberg Press. Most recently, she produced the exhibition and public project Guide for the Perplexed: How to Succeed in the New Poland at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist, who often works with photography to explore themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He received a B.F.A. in photography and Africana studies from New York University, an M.F.A./M.A. in photography and visual criticism from the California College of Arts as well as an honorary doctorate from MICA. Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture. He has exhibited internationally at such venues as the International Center of Photography, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain; Studio Museum in Harlem; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Bilphena Yahwon is a Baltimore-based writer, researcher, organizer, and womanist. She is also a member of Press Press, an interdisciplinary publishing practice organized to shift and deepen the understanding of voices, identities, and narratives. Her work uses a womanist approach and centers women’s health and well-being, transformative/restorative justice, and intersectionality.